Remember Me Like This (6 page)

G
RIFF DIDN
’
T KNOW IF
F
IONA
M
OORE WAS HIS GIRLFRIEND
. Last Saturday night, while he was skating the curb at Whataburger on Station Street, she’d sauntered across the parking lot and said, “I need your help with matters of the heart.” Then she led him by the hand around the building and, without a word, kissed him hard and long against the dumpster. He didn’t understand what was happening; she almost seemed angry with him. His eyes closed. The dumpster smelled of old food, acrid and rotting and metallic. Her mouth was sugary, but also tasted of something sharper; maybe she’d spiked her Coke with rum again. Then the ugly food odor fell away and he inhaled the faint and familiar scent of her perfume, the sweat in her hair. He thought he could hear the sounds of the marina a mile away: the heave and slosh of the waves against the pylons, the hollow clanging of cables hitting the masts of docked sailboats. When she was finished, Fiona bit the tip of his nose and skipped back into the restaurant. Griff stayed where he was, trembling. His first kiss.

That night, he had gone home and stared at her class photo for an hour, thinking
You just kissed me.
Now the school annual lay like a dirty magazine between his mattress and box spring. Most everything she wore was black. She’d covered the windows in her room with tinfoil to block out the sun, and then the next day she’d
done the same to Griff’s. She was a member of the National Honor Society who’d gotten a week of detention after a teacher caught her writing
I PUT THE SENSUAL IN NONCONSENSUAL
on the bathroom wall. She loved Halloween, hated Christmas. Fiona was old enough to drive, two years older than Griff and a few months older than Justin would have been, but she rode her bicycle everywhere. The bike reminded him of the kind characters rode in black-and-white movies—wicker basket behind her seat, squeeze horn on the handlebars. When Griff had asked why she didn’t take her driving test and get a car, she said, “Because I like to smell the world.” Ever since, he’d been helpless with love.

Until Saturday night, they’d just been friends. She towed him on his skateboard with her bike. They went to the beach to make fun of the sunbathers and catch hermit crabs; they’d let the crabs crawl over their backs until the chills were too much to bear. They closed themselves off in one or the other’s blacked-out room and talked about how much they hated Southport, about strange or sad things their parents had done, about Justin. Fiona had been in his grade. She’d once admitted to having had a crush on Justin, and Griff felt not jealousy but a pulse of embarrassing recognition. He realized that ever since his brother had been gone he’d nursed something of a crush on him, too. He pined for him. He both avoided and invoked his name, sometimes in the same conversation; Fiona, he’d noticed, did the same thing. They filled up shopping carts with odd combinations of items at H-E-B grocery, then abandoned them, and they sneaked into the pool at Villa Del Sol. They spent so much time together that everyone already assumed they were hooking up. One bright afternoon, riding her bike past the Teepee Motel, where he and some other skaters were carving around the drained pool, she shouted Griff’s name and when everyone looked, she lifted her shirt and flashed her lacy black bra.

But the guys she went out with were older—college kids from Corpus, a pilot from the air base in Kingsville, a Coast Guard cadet
who rode his motorcycle around Southport and whose tattooed arms were roped with muscle. She called them her “lovers,” a word Griff had never heard anyone else use. Fiona grew tired of them quickly, then acted put-upon until someone else swept her up. She confided everything to Griff in her room. He listened, nodded, tried to offer advice that both was sound and made him appear desirable. She cried. She chewed her nails. A month ago, after she’d broken up with the cadet, she’d asked Griff why she couldn’t just have
him
as her boyfriend and when he said she could, she rolled her eyes and said, “In my wet dreams.” Then she went to swipe rum from her parents’ liquor cabinet and left him alone in her room. Immediately, he peeled off his socks, doused them with her perfume, then stuffed them in his backpack. Smell you later, he thought. The socks had mostly stayed in the back of his closet, in a Ziploc bag behind the two fishbowls housing his old rock collection. Now they were with his yearbook under his mattress. His room was starting to smell like a girl’s.

And yet they’d barely talked since she’d kissed him on Saturday night. His calls had gone unreturned. He’d floated through the first part of the week in a fog of ecstasy and paranoia. His foot seemed to constantly be tapping against the floor, and moments came when he felt like he’d concocted the whole fantasy. When he felt like he was dissolving. When he felt like he could run full tilt for miles. His parents thought he was coming down with something, so finally, on Tuesday evening, he said his stomach hurt. Not a complete lie. For days, he’d felt ravenous but lost his appetite when he started to eat. He’d tried to distract himself with skating and videogames, but nothing worked. He would remember how she’d moaned, how right before the kiss ended, she’d gently touched their mouths with her fingers, traced the inside of his lips. How she could do that and not want to talk with him every waking moment—for that matter, how she could sleep at all—baffled him. He worried she’d done it because she was drunk or had lost a bet with her girlfriends. He
worried he’d botched the whole thing with poor technique. He’d always assumed he’d be a bad kisser.

Mostly, he worried that she’d kissed him because of his brother. The kids at school still sometimes regarded Griff with the same pitiful distance as they had the seagull a junior had pegged with a rock last year in P.E.—they’d watched the bird grow exhausted trying to take flight with a broken, bleeding wing and then fed it pizza crusts until the coach wrapped it in a gym towel and took it away. His brother’s disappearance got him picked for teams, invited to parties, allowed to cut in the lunch line. It was awful, and it was the reason he’d started avoiding other kids, the reason they’d made it so easy for him, the reason he’d gone through a phase of picking fights he couldn’t win. But Fiona had never pitied him. “To everyone else,” she’d said, “you’re that poor boy with the missing brother. To me, you’re just a blockhead.” She was right. He couldn’t recall an interaction where he wasn’t aware of the other person’s awareness, where his brother’s absence wasn’t encroaching. In the presence of almost everyone except Fiona, he felt two disparate pressures—to convey his certainty that his brother would come home, and to intimate that, were that not to happen, his family would withstand the loss. They would survive. Really, he was sure of neither.

Since his brother had vanished, he’d watched his parents fall away from each other; he’d listened to their affection turn to arguing and then to strained silence, and he often pictured a future where they lived in separate houses, in different towns or time zones. He could imagine his parents giving in and buying a gravestone for Justin, and then all of them starting lives where no one knew everything that had happened. He could feel himself bracing for all of it, doing the dismal calculations of what the years ahead held. Sometimes he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror and said, “My parents are divorced.” Other times, he’d peer at his reflection, his brown, unkempt hair and large eyes and slack shoulders, and
say, “My name is Griffin Campbell. I’m an only child.” He said it over and over until it sounded real.

Last night, his father had knocked on his door, then stepped awkwardly into the room. Rainbow’s tail thumped on the comforter. She started panting. Griff had been looking at his yearbook and now he felt caught. It wasn’t unusual for his father to come in to talk before bed. It was unusual for him to knock.

“Mom’s gone on to sleep,” his father said, as if Griff might be wondering, as if it were new. “Tomorrow’s her early shift, and then she’s volunteering with Alice.”

“Sounds right,” Griff said.

His father absently picked up a skate magazine from Griff’s desk, then put it down. He surveyed the room—Griff’s cluttered bureau and the skateboarding advertisements tacked to the walls and the two stacks of folded clothes that had been waiting to be put up since his mother brought them home from the dry cleaner’s last week. He glanced at Griff, smiled, then turned to the foiled-over window and gazed at it, as if seeing the night sky. His hands were in his pockets. Then Griff understood: His parents thought he was upset about Justin. They thought it a lot.

His father said, “What say we sneak out for Whataburgers? You didn’t eat much tonight.”

“I’m still a little queasy, I guess,” he said.

Rainbow rolled onto her side, groaned, smacked her lips. Griff liked when she did that.

“Or I can go through the drive-thru. Or if you have a taste for something else.”

“No, I’m good.”

Griff wanted to apologize for worrying him, but it wouldn’t accomplish anything. His father was always working to rally everyone, like a mascot at a football game.

“Lobster,” his father said, “if you want to talk—”

“My stomach’s just thrashed, Dad. I probably drank too much milk.”

His father turned to the wall, hands still in his pockets, and regarded the poster of a skater riding the wave of banked bricks under the Brooklyn Bridge. He asked where the photo had been taken.

“Brooklyn,” Griff said, then added, “It’s in New York.”

“Thanks, son,” his father said with a laugh. “It looks cool. Is that the best place to skate in the world?”

“I don’t know. It’s in a lot of magazines.”

“Maybe we’ll take a vacation,” his father said. “Your mother and I will see a Broadway show and you can skate in this strange, mythical land called Brooklyn.”

Griff smiled to be nice. Sometimes when his father started talking about vacations, Griff and his mother would sneak a glance at each other, a wink. They’d never gone farther than Houston or the Hill Country, and they hadn’t gone anywhere in years. Fiona’s family traveled a lot; she’d been to both coasts and to Hawaii.

His father said, “Does it smell like perfume in here?”

“I have a harem of ladies in my closet.”

“In other words, ‘Dad, time for bed.’ ”

Griff shrugged. He thought: Yes.

“You’re sure there’s nothing I can get you to eat? Nothing in the whole of South Texas sounds good?”

“I’m sure.”

His father snapped his fingers, like he’d solved a riddle. He said, “I’ll pick up shrimp tomorrow after class. If you don’t clean your plate, we’ll assume you’re staging a hunger strike.”

Later, Griff woke to the sound of his mother washing dishes. The chore was actually his, but some nights he shirked it so she’d have something mindless to do if she couldn’t sleep. Most nights, she’d look through photo albums or read about dolphins or browse missing-children websites. Some nights she rode the ferry back and forth from the island, and others she sneaked into Justin’s room to
punish herself. He considered going to talk with her, maybe tell her about the New York vacation idea, but he worried she’d feel guilty about waking him. In the dark, he checked his phone and saw that Fiona had left a message. His heart surged. She told him to meet her at the Teepee tomorrow afternoon because she had something to show him. He replayed the message three times, saved it. He clutched the perfumed socks to his chest and listened to his mother working in the kitchen. Whether she was upset or just sleepless he couldn’t tell. He only knew she was trying to move quietly, trying to let her family rest.

F
ROM THIS DISTANCE
—
FOUR YEARS
,
TWO WEEKS
,
FOUR DAYS
—Griff had only blurry recollections of his brother. He saw Justin the way he saw constellations; his image was hazed, made up of somewhat recognizable points of light that occasionally emerged from darkness—long eyelashes, top row of teeth a little bunched, skinny legs. Just before he disappeared, there’d been talk of Justin getting braces at Dr. McKemie’s. Griff remembered that his brother hated clipping his fingernails and the smell of canned dog food, and he always ordered his Cokes without ice and his favorite things to watch on television were
Wheel of Fortune
and Animal Planet. But he thought he should remember more. His parents’ minds were so full of the past that he knew they assumed his was too, but in truth his memory was emptying.

Worse, Griff’s most assured memories were of his brother behaving badly: Justin stealing candy and comic books from H-E-B, Justin copying other kids’ homework on the school bus, Justin emptying a shaker of salt into Griff’s Coke when he was out of the room, Justin kicking Griff between the legs after he threatened to tell about the salt. It had happened the day he went missing. Justin quickly turned remorseful, apologizing profusely, and invited Griff to go to skate on the seawall by the marina. Griff said no. Build a fort in the backyard? Go to the pawnshop to see if Papaw would let
them strum the guitars or cast fishing rods in the parking lot? Catch a matinee, then sneak into a second movie after the credits rolled? No, no, no. When at last he suggested they head to the beach to look for shells for their rock collections, Griff told him to go to hell, the worst thing he knew how to say. He was nine, his brother was eleven. Justin laughed. Then he set off toward the beach with his skateboard and never came back. A year later someone brought his board into the pawnshop, and though none of them admitted it, Griff saw how the development had gutted the family. He saw how they had to work harder to appear hopeful.

No one knew about the salt or Justin kicking him or how he’d tried to make amends. Griff hadn’t told his parents or Papaw or the detectives. Occasionally, he thought of telling Fiona, but he always stopped himself. At first, he’d thought Justin was staying away to punish him, to make him regret not accepting his apology, and his absence only addled Griff. Go to hell, he thought, just go straight to hell. Even after the search parties convened and Southport was papered with
MISSING
flyers and the orange-and-white Coast Guard boats were trawling the bay, Griff expected his brother to stroll through the door, smirking and refreshed, as though he’d only been gone for a short while. It seemed the kind of prank his brother would pull. When it became clear that Justin wasn’t coming home—although Griff still sometimes endured excruciatingly hopeful surges—their having argued felt simultaneously urgent and insignificant. But he kept the information to himself because he thought Justin would want him to. He was scared the knowledge would contradict the image his parents had of their older son, and of Griff for not having forgiven him, for not having accompanied him, and he was scared that telling would awaken some dormant guilt inside his heart, that he’d no longer be able to believe he was blameless in the ruining of their lives.